A study of a social work agency: the occupational routines and working practices of the education social work service

In this paper we will be examining the way in which the education social work service goes about its routine, everyday work with truants (which, for the purposes of this paper, will be seen as the service's major occupational task to resolve).¹ Such an analysis has, in our view, a twofold importance. Firstly, it adds to the extensive literature² on disaffection amongst school students; secondly, it contributes to juvenile justice studies³ which have highlighted the importance attached to truancy in the formal decision-making process; this in turn has led to the development of a range of administrative and judicial strategies to remedy the problem⁴. In addition, it is our view that the truancy problem is likely to increase in the light of the growing certainty of unemployment on leaving school for large sections of the youth population, coupled with fiscal cuts in the education budget: we have been able to show in our Sheffield-based research (which confirms trends indicated in earlier studies undertaken in this same city⁵ that there has been a statistically significant increase in non-attendance amongst fifth formers between 1976 and 1982 in the local comprehensive schools.⁶ The truancy issue has been perceived as a serious social problem for a number of years now⁷ and, on the same basis, we can expect that this will continue – indeed, as something of the moral panic that exists in the related social sphere of youth unemployment.⁸ Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the reference to the role of the service in the 1983 Conservative party manifesto:⁹‘we shall switch the emphasis in the education welfare service back to school attendance so as to reduce truancy'.